


shadowkat | Timebomb

by shadowkat67



Series: Angel The Series - Season 5- Episode Reviews [2]
Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Angel Investigations | Team Angel, Buffy the Vampire Slayer References, Episode Related, Gen, Literary References & Allusions, Meta, Reviews
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-04-30
Updated: 2004-04-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:00:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22398208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowkat67/pseuds/shadowkat67
Summary: Review/Meta on the Angel Episode 5.19 - Timebomb
Series: Angel The Series - Season 5- Episode Reviews [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1612354





	shadowkat | Timebomb

Ah time, weird thing time. Tonight when I phoned Kid Bro to wish him a happy birthday, we talked briefly about age. I asked if he had turned 34 now? He said he thought so. But wasn't sure. Time seemed to no longer have much meaning and the years just flow together. I said, that'll change now that you have a kid. But it was an oddly coincidental response, since earlier that day, I had the following conversation with a friend I met online. We'd meet in person once before this. We were discussing Angel's cancellation and Dark Shadows and she said the following:

My friend: "You may have been too young to remember it but there was a second Dark Shadows with Ben Cross-"  
Me:"Too young?" (This caught me by surprise since I knew I was two years older than she is, at least) "How young do you think I am?"  
My friend taken aback: "27"  
Me: "Uh no, I'm 37."  
My friend: "You are KIDDING!"

I took it as a compliment of course. But it hit me as odd and made me realize how weird age and time are. Also made me wonder how much her perception of me changed within those five brief minutes. Do we change our perceptions of people when we learn what age they are?

We seem to track our lives by days, weeks, months, years and if you live in the Western Hemisphere and happen to be Christian - your yearly cycle starts on Jan 1, New Year's Eve, and it is now 2004. And the Calendar begins with Christ's Death (AD, or BC (before his death).) Yet, in China, time may be judged differently. And the Jewish Calendar has another New Year's date. But everyone more or less follows the Christian linear calendar to keep confusion to a minimum.

We think linearly - so for us time flows in a straight line or our perception of it does. Yet, what if it didn't? How chaotic and confusing that would be. Jarring in fact.

And if you think about it - how we perceive time may have a lot to do with how we perceive destiny. If we believe it runs in a straight line, we may believe it is cause and effect, that each event equals another one, an inevitable string.

Memory is also affected by time. Our memories are after all sequential. Not scattered. And over time the earlier ones fade and the later ones grow more pronounced. Is it choice on our parts? Do we choose to forget the moment we are born? Or is it inevitable? And Memory does make us who we are in a way. Each memory building on the next one, and as memories melt away or fade or become repressed, we change as well. Take one memory away and it's like pulling a thread on a piece of frabric or tapestry, unraveling the whole thing. I remember watching Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, which like most movies about memory makes the same mistake - the view that you can remove one, without removing or changing all the others, so that person themselves change completely. Think about it. If I were to say remove any concept you had of riding a bike or what a bycycle was - how would that affect all those other memories? Yet time does remove memories, doesn't it? And how we perceive time is partly due to our memories, how we perceive reality is based on the trajectory of memory. Even  Eternal Sunshine makes this point. The protagonist states at the start of the film how he didn't seem to do much the last two years, they feel blank to him, empty of movement. (The movie itself plays with time btw, it starts in the present, then we flip to the past, then flip even further to the distant past, then back to the present again. The flips are jarring.)In the film, a vital memory is removed from the protagonist at his bequest. It shows how memory does inform who we are and without it - we cannot learn. We cannot adapt. We are doomed to repeat the same loop. (The movie ends differently than that, but to say more would spoil people who haven't seen it and it's unnecessary to this analysis.)

Angel 5.19 deals with the twin concepts of time and memory, it also deals with our perception and ways of dealing with them both.

In 5.19, TimeBomb, we see a hint of the after-effects of Wesely shattering the Orlon Window, which contained all their memories previous to the mindwipe, on Illyria and Wesely. Two people who are operating sort of outside time and space already due to Fred's tragic death and Illyria's uncertainity of where she fits in in this Brave New World.

Wes and Illyria now have two sets of memories. Illyria actually has three sets - her own, Fred's from mindwipe, Fred's from before the mindwipe. Those new memories are tearing at them both in different ways. Illyria is finding herself overwhelmed a bit with memories that aren't her own and they feel out of synch, she can't figure out which are which. Wes is struggling with the knowledge of what he did in the past and how it may have lead to the present and it may be driving him insane.

The other thing going on in TimeBomb is time goes wacky for Illyria. She no longer sees it in a straight line. It's out of sync and it jars her. So much so, that we start hearing words Fred would say - scientific terms, scientific analysis, which Illyria herself acknowledges in a soft aside as "not being her words". For Illyria, who has elements of chaos to her - time itself has become a chaotic entity threatening to destroy her. It does not help that her memories of it seem out of wack. She jumps back and forth and around not sure of where she lands within the wave, disoriented - until somewhere along the way she grabs an unwilling hitch-hiker. Angel. And this is where things begin to get *really* interesting.

Angel the king of the linear thought. Angel who follows Prophecies and feels trapped by them. Who believes in predestination. Who does not see time as something he can alter. Now, he's caught in Illyria's time loop and he sees her future - a future which is completely bleak - where everyone dies including him and without much purpose or any glorious send-off. No shanshue here. And he realizes something - you can change it. This is only one possible future. It does not have to happen. Illyria says it does. Angel believes he can change it or at first Illyria must be the one who can change it, he thinks he's powerless...

Then Illyria scolds him - tells him that he's caught in WR&H web. She describes WR&H as creating a web of sorts. So much power harnessed within it. Yet he does nothing with it. He lets it keep him trapped, like a fly in the web. She suggests the ruthless approach. No morality. No sensitivity. Make ambition your guide.

(I wish I had the exact words - it was a fascinating speech and a speech, that in an odd way not only echos Fred's speech to Angel in _Hellbound_ but is the flip side of it or possibly its twin (?) . In _Hellbound_ Fred tells Angel that what we do is save people. Angel says not everyone can be saved and funds shouldn't be used to save Spike. Fred insists that what they do is save people, that's why they are here. Illyria tells Angel that he has all this power in the web, he can use it, but he quibbles at its *moral* price, just as Fred looked at Angel and Eve quibbling with her over the *financial* price of saving Spike. The difference is - here Illyria is telling Angel to be ruthless, in Hellbound Fred is telling Angel to be merciful. Also in _Hellbound_ , Fred appears to be nuts writing on walls, trying to save Spike - while in _Timebomb_ , Wes appears to be nuts, busy looking through books trying to save Illyria. (The irony is, Fred is sane in Hellbound, it's a mislead, and Wes may actually be going insane - split in two in fact, becoming because of the restored memories, both men in the joke that he described in the dream, in _Underneath_ ) Fred uses a nuclear blast of power from WR&H to try and make Spike corporeal in Hellbound, while Illyria tells Angel WR&H have that power (she does) and Wes uses a weapon made at WR&H to pull the power, a nuclear type power, out of Illyria before she explodes. In both episodes - the idea of a web is expressed. Pavayne's web of magic, WR&H using Pavayne's blood to create their firm, Fred's use of a web of magic to catch the incorporal Spike ( a net) which both Pavayne and Spike feel. And in both episodes it's the threat to the gang that is caught and whose power is neutralized.)

Time too is a web. And unlike a tapestry, webs aren't destroyed by pulling one strand, they are alterred. Spiders are very clever creatures, they make their webs so when a strand is pulled it changes the web - like a maze, potentially trapping the fly or setting it free.

Angel goes back in time to the point in which they enter the training room to stop Illyria (he believes to kill her) and Angel pulls a strand of the web. He alters it, by doing the unexpected, saving Spike. And Wes does the unexpected, instead of killing Illyria, he saves her, removing the power she wishes to hold on to. And Angel learns something - you are only a puppet if you choose to be.

But there are other things going on here - we have the woman who trades her child for her husband's memories, an echo perhaps of Angel who trades his friend's memories for his child's welfare. Memories again. Gunn voices to Angel how the worst thing about the penalty cell was the fake life he lead, not the heart being torn from his chest. And we wonder, as I'm sure Angel must, what Gunn would do if he knew his memories had been alterred long before that? He clearly did not get the other memories back. The woman and the child also harkens back to other episodes in the series - Judgement Day S2 ATS. In Judgement Day, Angel is defending a woman from having her child taken from her - it's when he first becomes a champion. It also harkens back to other children - Darla and Connor. Cordelia and Jasmine. And of course Corbin Fries and his son. Now Angel is serving the demons who sacrifice the children, not the mothers? What bizzarro world is this? Or is Angel playing another type of game altogether?

There's also the trust issues. He doesn't trust Gunn. He doesn't trust Wes. He doesn't trust Lorne. And he doesn't quite know what to make of Illyria. Yet, he may trust Spike. It's the flip side of the start of the season - where everyone trusted Angel and he trusted his friends (or appeared to) and no one trusted Spike. Especially *not* Angel. Memory may play a role here as well. Corrupted memory. Because that's what Illyria and Wes have - corrupted memories like the corrupted memory on a computer disc or hard-drive where data is scattered. Gunn's memories are also corrupted by the implants, by the penalty box, and by the mindwipe. As are Lorne's by the mindwipe. So what happens when memory is corrupted - does it explode innward or outward like time? Does reality shift as memories shift?

Another thing about memory - without memory, we can't change or adapt or learn. It's through our memories of past mistakes, we learn not to repeat them. This is shown in the sparing sequence with Spike and Illyria - Illyria wonders about Spike's changes in fighting style, how he's improved with her. He says people adapt with experience. She says compromise. He says learn. Memory - provides us with the means to learn and adapt and evolve. Without it, we don't learn. We are doomed to repeat the same mistakes. Make the same moves.  
Repeat the same loop. Remembering...makes us try something new.

Finally we have the illusions to kings and kingdoms. Making me think of Shakespearean plays. Illyria is the kingdom of twins in Twelth Night where Sebastian and Viola are mistaken for each other causing all sorts of bizarre misunderstandings. Macbeth is the king who follows the three fates, then says the hell with fate and goes forth ruthlessly to take what is his. Lear is the king who destroys his family to preserve power, yet loses both. And Henry V is the king who comes to power while friends with a fool.


End file.
